Microsoft Office vs. OpenOffice vs. Lotus Symphony

The heat is on, Microsoft pushes against OpenOffice, Infoworld analyses the rationale behind the attack and Lotus Symphony is due for its version 3.0. Imagine for a moment you get hired as CTO or CIO of a large organization. Which one would you pick and standardise on? My take: divide and conquer. You have two groups of users: your existing base with paid-for licences and new users who don't have an [Insert-your-flavour-here] office licence yet. For old world economies the later group might not exist, so we have a clear emerging economy only problem at hand. So for the first group the big question: what improvement would a new version bring? Most likely none given the way office documents are probably used. For the later group a package that allows to seamlessly interact with the first group makes sense. Now you can start arguing if that is given with [Insert-your-flavour-here].
However your real effort should go into a review: what office documents can be eradicated from your organisation. All these stand-alone documents, living on users hard drives or in document repositories form little islands of poorly structured information that are more and more difficult to manage and maintain. We have tons of tools, beginning with eMail, who try to make these office blobs flow nicely instead of starting with information flow in the beginning. All these macro-infested spreadsheets that form the backbone of your monthly reporting would be better replaced by a dashboard, the tons of text document forming the requirements for that software project live happily in a WIKI and the progress reports are just fine in that blog. Need to have a spreadsheet front-end to a database with concurrent editing capabilities? Try ZK Spreadsheet. Need a list? Try Quickr or this. While you are on it make sure all this tooling works well on mobile devices (office documents don't work well). You will reach the point where your remaining document needs will be rather simple. Then go and revisit your Office decision again.